Bringing you the latest news and information from the world of jazz and beyond...

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

RICARDO GRILLI - IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER

In the
seven years since leaving his native São Paulo for Boston and then New York,
guitarist Ricardo Grilli has found his voice as a distinctive jazz player and
composer. His glowing debut album, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, which his
Dark House label will release on October 15, chronicles that journey in rich
detail.

Grilli's
restless creativity is manifested in his love of odd meters, offbeat
structures, and themes that keep circling back on themselves like the narrative
lines in the Italo Calvino novel from which Traveler takes its name. The
guitarist, now 27, began writing songs out of necessity while studying at the
Berklee College of Music in Boston. "I figured the best way to get people
to play with me was to write interesting music they would want to play,"
he says. "And that worked."

Among
the Berklee classmates with whom he forged an especially tight bond was the
pianist Christian Li, who's featured on Traveler along with saxophonist Gustavo
D'Amico, a friend of Grilli's from Brazil, and the bass-drum team of Jared
Henderson and Lee Fish, whom Grilli met at a Boston club.

As a
composer, Grilli uses a kind of free association method, starting out with a
word or phrase and seeing where it will take him musically. The germ for the
wistful "Revolver" was a magazine interview with R&B singer John
Legend about his album, Evolver. That led Grilli to ruminate on the word
"revolver" and the mechanism of "a thing that turns." In
his song, he says, "I made the chords go round almost like Bill Evans did
on 'Time Remembered.'" (Revolver also is the title of his favorite Beatles
album.)

"Riga,"
a coolly propulsive tune featuring D'Amico on soprano saxophone, was named
after the Baltic city, where Grilli once attended a conference as a student
representative. "The Great Escape," boasting one of Grilli's most
fluid, entrancing solos and sparkling electric piano by Li, is a nod to the
Steve McQueen classic. The note-tripping, modal-style "Mark I" (a
play on Mach 1) was written for tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, whose 2001
album, Dharma Days, is one of Grilli's all-time favorites. That album features
Rosenwinkel, for whom Grilli wrote the alternately earthy and lighter-than-air
"The Abstract."